On Jun 23, 2005, at 5:27 PM, William T Goodall wrote:
On 23 Jun 2005, at 11:24 pm, Dave Land wrote:
On Jun 23, 2005, at 3:12 PM, William T Goodall wrote:
LOL. If you think those are plain and simple questions your mind is
obviously very much more clouded than mine.
I submit that the questions are very plain and quite simple.
In normal usage how hard or simple a question is is decided by how
hard or simple it is to produce the answer. So if you think they are
simple, let's see your simple answers :)
The questions were not difficult to parse. Neither should it have been
difficult for a reasonable person (I hope you will accept that either
of us could be described thus) to grasp that Frank Schmidt's intent was
to elicit an elucidation of the criteria you use to rate religion as
evil.
The answers, on the other hand, are extraordinarily complex, and may
well
be beyond your ken.
Oh, you don't think they are simple after all. You think they are
difficult questions which you hope I am too stupid to have answers
for. I guess the ad hominem attack indicates you realise you are on
the losing side of this argument :)
I never said that providing answers to these simple questions was
simple: that was your (possibly intentional) misinterpretation. But you
are right in that my ad hominem attack was unwarranted, if not
unprovoked. I apologize for it.
Here's a problem that I have with your ongoing attack on religion: it
relies on numerous logical fallacies:
The most common is the appeal to anecdotal evidence: a religious person
did an evil thing. Therefore, religion must be evil. You also
frequently appeal to ridicule: you present religious people as
ridiculous, with the unsupported implication that religion is therefore
ridiculous. Of course, you are engaging in the appeal to repetition:
religion must be evil, because you said it over and over and over and
over and over and over again. But mainly, your fail to state your
assumptions. It's not strictly a logical fallacy, but it does cause
your argument to be viewed with suspicion. This is what Frank Schmidt
was trying to get you to do: to state with some clarity and
completeness the assumptions behind your repetition of ridiculing
anecdotes.
I have no reason to believe that this message will be met with anything
approaching serious consideration, but anticipate that a sentence or
two will be singled out for some kind of facile ridicule. This is not
an ad hominem attack, it is an extrapolation from past experience.
Dave
PS: A good source of information about logical fallacies is the Atheism
Web:
http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html.
Another is at http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/
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